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Ky. Gov.: All elected officials who have settled sexual harassment claims should resign

Kentucky Republican Gov. Matt Bevin answering questions about a plan to make changes to the state’s struggling public pension system on Wednesday, Oct. 18, 2017, in Frankfort, Ky. ADAM BEAM / AP

FRANKFORT, Ky. — Kentucky’s Republican governor has called for the immediate resignation of any elected official who has settled sexual harassment allegations.

Gov. Matt Bevin held a news conference on Saturday at the state Capitol days after the Courier-Journal reported Republican House Speaker Jeff Hoover had settled a sexual harassment allegation outside of court with one of his staffers.

Bevin said the accused owed it those who they represent and said their despicable, vulgar behavior will not be accepted in Frankfort, CBS affiliate WKYT reports.

“The people of Kentucky deserve better. We appropriately demand a high level of integrity from our leaders, and will tolerate nothing less in our state,” said Bevin.

Bevin did not mention Hoover’s name and he would not answer questions from reporters. But he seemed to refer to the allegations when he said they have not been denied and have been corroborated by other sources. He also indicated the allegations involve multiple elected and unelected officials, but he would not identify them.

Asked if he wanted Hoover to resign, Bevin said “you heard me” as he left the rotunda.

Republican leaders said Saturday they plan to hire a law firm to investigate the report that House Speaker Jeff Hoover settled a sexual harassment claim outside of court with one of his staffers.

A news release from the GOP leadership on Saturday says they did not consult Hoover, but have informed him of the decision.

Devin Patrick Kelley: What we know about the Texas church shooting suspect
The suspect who opened fire inside a South Texas church has been identified as 26-year-old Devin Patrick Kelley, law enforcement sources tell CBS News. He has a residence in New Braunfels, Texas, which is about a 35 mile drive from where the attack took place in Sutherland Springs.

The shooting left at least 26 people dead and 20 others injured in what Texas Gov. Greg Abbott described as the worst mass shooting in his state’s history.

On Sunday night, authorities only identified the suspect as a young white male. They said he was dressed in all black and tactical gear when he opened fire at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs.

After a car chase with police, the suspect was shot and declared dead. It’s unclear if the suspect shot himself or if he was killed by police.

Kelley is a former U.S. Air Force member who served from 2010 to 2014. He was dishonorably discharged and court martialed in May 2014, CBS News has learned.

Air Force spokesperson Ann Stefanek told The Associated Press that records show Kelley served in Logistics Readiness at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico from 2010 until his discharge. The circumstances under which he left the service were not immediately available.

The Pentagon told the AP that Kelley was an airman “at one point,” but did not provide additional details.

Devin Patrick Kelley
Officials say the suspect lived in a San Antonio suburb and doesn’t appear to be linked to any organized terrorist groups. CBS News has learned Kelley has a wife named Danielle Lee Shields.

Investigators will look at his social media posts made in the days prior to Sunday’s attack — including one that appeared to display an AR-15 semiautomatic weapon. Kelley’s date of birth is listed as Feb. 21, 1991.

Loyalist forces stand guard on a main road in the Mansoura residential district of Yemen’s second city of Aden after they pushed Al-Qaeda out of parts of the southern city on March 30, 2016, military sources said. SALEH AL-OBEIDI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

SANAA, Yemen — Masked militants set off a large car bomb outside a security headquarters in Yemen’s southern port city of Aden early Sunday killing at least five soldiers before storming the compound, officials said.

Speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief reporters, the security officials said the militants placed snipers on the roof and gunned down most of the security forces inside. The officials gave conflicting accounts of what happened next inside the building. They initially said that the militants had taken an unknown number of people hostage. Later they said that they opened cell gates and released prisoners.

Witnesses said at least four militant snipers could be seen on the roof of the compound. They also described mayhem as dead bodies littering the compound’s front courtyard couldn’t be retrieved because of the continuous sniper fire. Shallal al-Shayae, the security chief, was not inside the compound at the time of the attack, the officials said.

In an online statement, the local affiliate of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) claimed responsibility for the attack, saying they killed 50 soldiers and identified the bomber as Abu Othman al-Hadrami.

A Saudi-led coalition meanwhile launched a wave of airstrikes — starting overnight and continuing until noon the next day — on the rebel-held capital, Sanaa, apparently in response to a ballistic missile fired by the rebels toward an international airport on the outskirts of Riyadh, the Saudi capital. Saudi Arabia said it shot down the missile before it hit its target, with fragments landing in an uninhabited area north of the capital.

A Houthi fighter talks on the phone as he walks at the site of an air strike on a parade square in Sanaa, Yemen November 5, 2017. KHALED ABDULLAH/REUTERS
U.S. President Donald Trump was quick to blame Iran. “A shot was just taken by Iran, in my opinion, at Saudi Arabia. And our system knocked it down,” Mr. Trump said, referring to the Patriot missile batteries Saudi Arabia purchased from the U.S.

Iran’s Defense Minister Gen. Amir Hatami has denied his country was involved in the incident. “Does anyone ask the United States what are you giving to Saudi Arabia?” he was quoted by the semi-official ISNA news agency as saying.

Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard Chief, Maj. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, also said that Iran can’t transfer rockets to Yemen and stressed that the missiles were made there. He described Mr. Trump’s comments as “lies.”

Yemen is embroiled in a war between Iran-backed Shiite rebels, known as Houthis, and the internationally recognized government, which is allied with a Saudi-led military coalition. The government has been based in Saudi Arabia since the Houthis overran the capital Sanaa in 2014. Government forces ostensibly control Aden, but the city remains volatile.

The Houthis said in a statement that the missile was launched in response to bombings that have killed civilians. The Houthis have fired a number of missiles across the border in recent years, but this appeared to be the deepest strike yet within Saudi territory.

Riyadh is around 620 miles north of the border with Yemen.

Saudi-led airstrikes in Yemen have killed and wounded thousands of civilians, hitting houses, busy markets, hospitals and schools in what rights groups have said amounts to war crimes. Houthi artillery has also killed a large numbers of civilians. The war has claimed more than 10,000 lives and driven the Arab world’s poorest country to the brink of famine.

In this season of shorter days and longer nights we probably need the sight of flowers more than ever. Perfect timing for Ben Tracy’s “Postcard From Tokyo”:

The mornings begin shrouded in fog and surrounded by color. Yellow, red, pink … a forest of flowers begins to grow.

The Tokyo floral studio of Makoto Azuma looks more like a laboratory, and his team more like a Japanese rock band. Azuma barely speaks as he works. His focus is unbroken, as his fingers perfect each petal until his creation is complete.

Tracy asked, “When you look at a flower, what do you see?”

From Makoto Azuma’s Bottle Flower Collection. MAKOTO AZUMA
“I see flowers as symbolizing life,” he replied. “When a flower is cut and removed from the soil, it begins a new life.”

So nearly nothing is left on the cutting room floor. Trash becomes treasure locked inside a bottle.

“I can put flowers inside a vase but they would look nothing like what you do,” Tracy said. “Where does the inspiration come from?”

“The flowers themselves are my inspiration” Azuma said. “It tells me how to make it look more beautiful.”

And he’s always looking for interesting locations to plant his work — captured with stunning photography.

Azuma’s talents have also been on display at fashion houses such as Fendi and Hermes, and even lined the runway at fashion shows.

To watch Makoto Azuma’s “Burning Flowers” installation click on the video player below.

Burning Flowers by AMKK000 on YouTube
And while you’ve probably already realized that he’s not your average florist, Makoto Azuma destroys any preconceived notions of what that word even means.

Flowers in ice. MAKOTO AZUMA
He and his team have created elaborate videos of their larger-than-life botanical adventures.

They’ve planted a bonsai tree in the middle of a blizzard, and frozen flowers inside giant blocks of ice.

They’ve sailed a floral armada out onto the open ocean, and sunk a giant arrangement down to the bottom of the sea.

And then there was the time a bouquet boldly went where no bouquet has gone before — into space.

Left: Makoto Azuma’s “Sephirothic Flower: Diving Into The Unknown,” photographed at the bottom of the sea. Right: The artist’s “Exobiotanica2: Botanical Space Flight,” launched above Earth. MAKOTO AZUMA
Tracy asked, “Does that bring attention and therefore you sell more flowers? Or is there something you are trying to communicate?”

“I like to push the envelope” Azuma said. “An arrangement of flowers on a table is nice, but I want to find new ways flowers can move people.”

It’s also part of his near-obsession with the science behind how flowers live, and how they die.

Inside a room at his studio he conducts detailed experiments, documenting how much water different types of flowers need under various conditions, and how long they survive. He says that informs how he makes the most of a flower’s 10-day lifespan.

Bestselling author Ta-Nehisi Coates pulls no punches in his writings about race relations in America. This morning, he discusses the fine print with our Martha Teichner:

It’s not all that often that a guy who writes about race can sell out a 3,000-seat theater … on a weeknight, especially. But Ta-Nehisi Coates routinely has fans — as many white as black — lined up around the block for tough talk some Americans might be uncomfortable hearing.

“If you are attempting to study American history and you don’t understand the force of white supremacy, you fundamentally misunderstand America,” he told an audience last month at the Metropolitan AME Church in Washington, D.C.

Teichner asked Coates, “Who is your audience?”

“Well, first of all I’m talking to myself,” he laughed. “Secondly, it’s probably young African-American kids who came up like me.”

ONE WORLD
“But whole bunches of white people buy your books in large numbers.”

“Yeah, I know, and I don’t know why it is!”

“Are you surprised?”

“Yes. I mean, I’m not surprised anymore, but initially I was very surprised.”

His latest book, “We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy” by Ta-Nehisi Coates (One World), an expanded version of essays he wrote for The Atlantic since 2008, was an instant bestseller. His last, a letter to his son about the hazards of being a black male in America (“Between the World and Me”), spent 80 weeks on The New York Times list. It won the National Book Award in 2015, the same year Ta-Nehisi Coates received a so-called MacArthur “genius grant.”

“To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The nakedness is not an error, nor pathology. The nakedness is the correct and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under fear.”

Coates said, “I try to write in such a way that it makes people feel things. I don’t want them to read what I’m writing and just say, ‘I think that’s right’ and agree with me. I want them to read something and then walk away and be haunted by it.”

Forty-two now, Coates grew up in Baltimore surrounded by violence … and books. His father, Paul Coates, a one-time Black Panther, published forgotten African-American writers in his basement, and worked for years as a research librarian at historically black Howard University, in Washington, D.C.

Author and essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates with correspondent Martha Teichner. CBS NEWS
Touring the university’s library, where Ta-Nehisi would come as a child with his father, Paul Coates said, “Much of this collection is older than the university. It’s older than 150 years; it goes back to the abolitionist period. I feel that energy when I enter this space.

“I wanted [Ta-Nehisi] to be connected to his community,” Paul said. “I wanted him to give back and understand that he was not separate from his community, that his successes could only be the successes of his community, and that his community was actually his lifeblood.”

Later, as a Howard student in the mid-’90s, Coates practically lived in this library. “You literally could go through that card catalog back there and in my recollection, it was almost anything I wanted to read written by a black author, I could just go get. I felt liberated in here.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates on the writing process
Play VIDEO
Ta-Nehisi Coates on the writing process
Howard, for him, was an awakening — less about his classes, more about self-education, experiencing a whole world in a small space: “You would meet students from Africa here, students from the Caribbean,” he said.

Although he didn’t graduate, it was at Howard that he began to write, and where he made friends with another student, Prince Jones, whose killing by police in 2000 as he drove to his fiance’s home, galvanized Coates’ rage, and made him the writer he is now.

“I had somebody who I knew, a living person whose life had value, and it was taken through no fault of his own,” Coates said. “I write what I write in the way that I write it. I’m not being abstract, you know. I’m talking about something that, you know, is a part of my life.”

A national correspondent for The Atlantic, his June 2014 cover story, “The Case for Reparations,” was his controversial ticket to prominence. His argument: that the wealth gap (“For every nickel of wealth that the average black family has, a white family has a dollar”) is the result of a long history of discriminatory housing policies, and must be redressed.

To Coates, “the very idea of uplift is the thing that is most threatening.”

Suddenly, he was the nation’s lightning rod on race.

An excerpt from the new book, published recently in The Atlantic, contends that Donald Trump couldn’t have been elected had his predecessor not been Barack Obama.

White House statement on Trump’s call with Saudi king doesn’t mention arrests

Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud (R) presents U.S. President Donald Trump with the Collar of Abdulaziz Al Saud Medal at the Royal Court in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia May 20, 2017. JONATHAN ERNST

A statement the White House released about a phone call between President Donald Trump and Saudi Arabia’s King Salman did not make any reference to the overnight arrests of high-level princes and officials in the kingdom.

“President Donald J. Trump spoke yesterday with King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia,” the White House statement said Sunday. “King Salman expressed his condolences for the recent terrorist attack in New York City. President Trump thanked the King for his support and emphasized America’s commitment to defeating ISIS.”

The statement said Mr. Trump and Salman discussed “the continuing threat of Iranian-backed Houthi militias in Yemen” and Saudi Arabia’s interception of a missile fired from Yemen at its capital, Riyadh.

Mr. Trump also thanked the monarch for Saudi Arabia’s military purchases, including a $15 billion investment in the American-made THAAD anti-ballistic missile defense system, and he asked the king to strongly consider listing state-oil firm Aramco on a stock exchange in the United States, which Mr. Trump had earlier mentioned in a tweet.

Would very much appreciate Saudi Arabia doing their IPO of Aramco with the New York Stock Exchange. Important to the United States!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 4, 2017
Saudi Arabia arrested dozens of princes, senior military officers, businessmen and top officials, including a well-known royal billionaire with extensive holdings in Western companies, as part of a sweeping purported anti-corruption probe that further cements control in the hands of its young crown prince.

A high-level employee at Prince Alwaleed bin Talal’s Kingdom Holding Co. told The Associated Press that the royal, who is one of the world’s richest men, was among those detained overnight Saturday. The company’s stock was down nearly 9 percent in trading Sunday on the Saudi stock exchange.

The surprise arrests, which also reportedly include two of the late King Abdullah’s sons, were hailed by pro-government media outlets as the greatest sign yet that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is keeping his promise to reform the country, long plagued by allegations of corruption at the highest levels of government.

Analysts have suggested the arrest of once-untouchable members of the royal family is the latest sign that the 32-year-old crown prince is moving to quash potential rivals or critics. The prince’s swift rise to power has unnerved more experienced, elder members of the ruling Al Saud family, which has long ruled by consensus, though ultimate decision-making remains with the monarch.

The king named his son, the crown prince, as head of an anti-corruption committee established late Saturday, just hours before its arrest of top officials.

A 60-mile stretch of virgin jungle forms the border between Colombia and Panama. It’s the only break in more than 19,000 miles of highway that connects the Arctic Ocean and the southern tip of South America.

It’s called the Darien Gap – and it’s a fabled, legendary no-man’s land that’s bedeviled the most storied adventurers, members of the American military, and legions of would-be migrants. But it doesn’t put them off. Even today, tens of thousands of migrants a year risk their lives to cross it.

When the CBSN Originals team set out to cross the gap, we meet Shahab Shahbazi. He’s from Iran, thousands of miles from home, sitting in a smuggler’s home in the middle of nowhere, Colombia.

“I’m trying to find a life,” he tells us. “I’m trying to find out if I can have a better life or not.”

Shahab has a small bag with him, and no more clothes than those he already wears. Like many of the migrants we’ll meet, he seems hideously under-prepared for a week-long, life-threatening trek.

“But… I got to go. I need life. I need more life,” he says.

Migrants can arrive at the southern fringe of the jungle with relative ease, due to lax immigration policies in a number of South American countries. Under the cover of the jungle, they cross illegally from South into Central America. Some will pay smugglers — often known as “coyotes” — a few hundreds dollars to guide them through this notoriously difficult no-man’s land. Other options are far easier — like taking a boat or plane into Central America right up to the doorstep of the U.S. But they heighten the risk of capture and immediate deportation, a crushing setback for migrants when every step on the journey often means starting afresh from nothing.

This particular step comes with its own unique risks. Augustin, one of the smugglers we follow, says “The Darien Gap is… very dangerous. Because there are many hills, many rivers… many snakes, many jaguars. I’ve seen many people die. Not just one. Many.” Added to that, there are violent paramilitary groups who control the drug smuggling corridor that runs parallel, but deeper inside the jungle.

The sheer physical ardour of the trek, however, is the biggest challenge, as we find. Usually within 30 minutes of setting out, we’ve waded through waist-deep waters, soaking our socks for the remainder of the day. Our wet, shriveled and blistered feet are impossibly painful. Most people on the route don’t have a change of clothes.

“I don’t have anything else,” says Shahab. “One pair of pants,” he says of his belongings.

Shahab, who fled Iran due to religious persecution CBS NEWS
The daily diet is just as meagre. It’s rice, all day, with maybe a 1/4 of a can of tuna. It’s bland, but it provides the calories we need to forge ahead, and it’s relatively light.

At the end of a long day, we pepper Shahab with questions about his motivations. He speaks better Spanish than English, having spent years in Venezuela after fleeing Iran.

I ask Shahab, “What do you want to do when you get to the US? If you get to the US?”

“My professional trade is carpentry. I think I want to keep being a carpenter. If not, I’ll be a chef. I’m going to see what I can find in the US.”

He tells me about what he left behind. A family who doesn’t know he’s here in the Darien and a girlfriend in Venezuela.

“She’s my love. She’s my heart. I always think fondly of her. I miss her. And I think about where and when I can see her again.”

The next morning, we pack up camp. Our guides tell us today will be hell. There’s a steep ascent ahead — perhaps the hardest part of the journey. And they warn that we have far too much baggage.

We’ve packed for a long journey — three cameras and enough batteries to allow us to operate them for two weeks. Memory cards, backup drives to seal and secure our memories, sat phones and food. It’s too much to carry, so out go “non-essentials” like toilet paper, ‘extra’ underwear, hand sanitizer.

As I jettison weight, a group of eight migrants catches up with us — from halfway around the world, mostly India and Sri Lanka. Because of a deportation agreement between Panama and Latin American nations, the route is far less palatable to would-be migrants from those countries now. But the route is still plied daily by migrants from much farther afield who see it as a doorway to North America. Augustin, the smuggler, had told us: “Cubans, Haitians, Nepalese, Dominicans, from India, and yes, from Africa too. I calculate that I helped about 2,000. I guided them through and gave them help. Last year, they doubled in numbers.”

Finally, we summit the mountain that’s essentially the demarcation line between Panama and Colombia.

Review: Dennis Hopper as remembered by his right hand man in “Along for the Ride”

Actor-director Dennis Hopper and his friend-assistant, Satya de la Manitou, as seen in the new documentary “Along for the Ride.” SIGNIFICANT PRODUCTIONS / HAT & BEARD FILMS

He outlived James Dean, held his own against John Wayne, and with Jack Nicholson created the pinnacle of the 1960s independent film, “Easy Rider.” Dennis Hopper was a maverick, a multi-hyphenate of a most illustrious sort: actor-writer-director-photographer-carouser.

Following “Easy Rider,” he could write his own ticket in Hollywood, and did so, grabbing $ 1 million and final cut from Universal to movie “The Last Movie” in the mountains of Peru. The resulting film may have been art, and the studio was determined it was not commerce, and buried it.

Dennis Hopper filming “The Last Movie.” UNIVERSAL PICTURES
Blacklisted by the studios, Hopper becomes a pariah, though a legendary one. He maintained a bohemian existence in Taos, NM, in the years before he overcame his alcoholism and revived his career with the movie “Apocalypse Now,” “Out of the Blue,” “Blue Velvet,” “Hoosiers” (for which he earned his sole acting Oscar nomination), and “Speed.”

Instrumental to Hopper’s survival was his right-hand man, Satya de la Manitou, whom he met at the time of “Last Movie” and whose friendship and service over decades helped maintain the allure, and the life, of the star, not least of which when he shanghaied the actor off to rehab.

De la Manitou provides wistful narration in the new documentary “Along for the Ride” (opening Friday), in which he basks in the memory of his friend (who died in 2010), and in the special place he held as the adjutant of a genius. [As such, “Along for the Ride” is a pair with another recent documentary, “Filmworker,” in which Leon Vitali recalls the life of he lived at the beck-and-call of another genius, Stanley Kubrick.]

Directed by Nick Ebeling, the documentary features invigorating remembrances from many who were pulled into Hopper’s orbit during the 1970s and ’80s, including Wim directors Wenders and David Lynch, actors Dean Stockwell, Russ Tamblyn and Linda Manz, exec studio Michael Medavoy, musician Dwight Yoakam, architect Frank Gehry, and artists Ed Ruscha and Tony Shafrazi.

Dennis Hopper: 1936-2010
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Dennis Hopper: 1936-2010
De la Manitou binds it together, rummaging through storage units and scrapbooks, the bleakly beautiful landscape of Taos, and the Peruvian locations of “The Last Movie,” which refused to change from how they looked almost five decades ago, when Hopper brought the artifice of cinema for a story about the artifice of cinema.

The movie’s soundtrack is smothered at times by a score from Gemma Thompson (of Savages), but the crisp, black-and-white cinematography by Ebeling, Danny Reams and Randy Wedick, rare photographs, and snippets of Super 8mm footage taken on the locations of the two movies and soirees, pull you right into the period.

The film is a black-and-white contact sheet of a movie – nostalgic fragments in time lovingly preserved and highlighted by grease pencils, used to illuminate a portrait that is nonetheless too big to be contained in any single account, no matter how devotional .

And now a page from our “Sunday Morning” Almanac: November 5, 1893, 124 years ago today – Day One for the man called “The Father of Streamlining.”

For that was the day Raymond Loewy was born in Paris.

An award-winning model airplane designer while still a boy, Loewy moved to the United States after World War I, and went to work.

He transformed the railroad locomotive and the Greyhound bus. He designed modern sewing machines and popcorn machines … and filled his home with his own creations.
Book excerpt: Art Garfunkel’s “What Is It All but Luminous”
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In this excerpt from his new memoir, “What Is It All But Luminous: Notes From an Underground Man” (Knopf), singer Art Garfunkel writes of his early fascination with radio, rock ‘n’ roll, and a fellow classmate named Paul Simon .

KNOPF
On Saturday mornings, in 1953, in Keds sneakers, white on white, I took my basketball to P.S. 164. We played half-court ball, three on three. Or else I listened to Martin Block’s Make-Believe Ballroom on the radio. I loved to chart the top thirty songs. It was the numbers that got me. I kept meticulous lists – when a new singer like Tony Bennett came onto the charts with “Rags to Riches.” I watched the record jump from, say, # 23 to # 14 in a week. The mathematics of the jumps went to my sense of fun. I was commercially aware through the Hit Parade, as well as involved in the music. Johnny Ray’s “Cry,” the Crewcuts’ “Sha-boom,” Roy Hamilton ballads, “Unchained Melody” reached me. Soon the Everly Brothers would take me for The Big Ride.

As I entered Parsons Junior High where the tough kids are, Paul Simon became my one and only friend. We saw each other’s uniqueness. We smoked our first cigarettes. We have retreated from all other kids. And we laughed. I opened my school desk one day in 1954 and saw a note from Ira Green to a friend: “Listen to the radio tonight, I have a dedication to you.” I was aware that Alan Freed had taken this subversive music from Cleveland to New York City. He read dedications from teenage lovers before playing “Earth Angel,” “Sincerely.” When he played Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally,” he left the studio mic open enough to hear him pounding a stack of telephone books to the backbeat. This was no Martin Block.

Maybe I was in the land of payola, of “back alley enterprise” and pill-head disc jockeying, but what I was was that Alan Freed loved us kids to dance, romance, and fall in love, and the music would send us. It sent me for life. It was rhythm and blues. It was black. It was from New Orleans, Chicago, Philadelphia. It was dirty music (read sexual). One night Alan Freed called it “rock ‘n’ roll.” Hip was born for me. Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis. Bobby Freeman asked, “Do you want dance, squeeze and hug me all through the night?” and you knew she did.

I was captured. So was Paul. We followed WINS radio. Paul bought a guitar. We used my father’s wire recorder, then Paul’s Webcor tape machine. Holding rehearsals in our basements, we were little perfectionists. We put sound on sound (stacking two layers of our singing). With the courage to listen and cringe about how not right it was yet, we are going to record.

We were guitar-based little rockers. Paul had the guitar. We wrote streamlined harmonies whose intervals were thirds, as I learned it from the Andrews Sisters to Don and Phil and floated it over Paul’s chugging hammering-on-guitar technique. It was bluesy, it was rockabilly, it was rock ‘n’ roll. We took “woo-bop-a-loo-chi-ba” from Gene Vincent’s “Be-bop-a-lula.” We stole Buddy Holly’s country flavor (“Oh Boy”), the Everlys’ harmony (“Wake Up Little Susie”). Paul took Elvis’s everything (“Mystery Train”). As Paul drove the rhythm, I brought us into a vocal blend. We were the closest of chums, making out with our girls across the basement floor. We showed each other our versions of masturbation (mine used a hand). “The Girl for Me” was the first song we wrote – innocent, a pathetic “Earth Angel.” In junior high we added Stu Kutcher and Angel and Ida Pellagrini.

All the while, I did a lot of homework, the shy kid’s retreat. My geometry page was a model of perfection. Anything worth doing is worth doing extraordinarily well – why not best in the world?

Summer day can be very uncomfortable, but there are some things you can do to avoid the heat. You can spend some time on the beach or relax by the pool, but it will not help anything when you try to sleep soundly at night. For maximum comfort in your home you need a climate control system that can handle all the heat that Mother Nature has to offer. Here are some tips on how to choose the right unit when it’s time to set up air conditioning in Watkinsville or other communities.

How to Choose the Right Central Air Conditioner

Get Your Accurate Home Measurement

When building houses, builders often focus on square footage when making decisions about things like floor coverings, layout and other design elements. While the surface area of ​​the house is an important measure to determine the amount of living space, this is a bad factor when determining the appropriate heating and air conditioning units for residence. Because heat energy will always extend to fill the overall volume of the building, it is imperative that you always pay attention to the height of the ceiling while exploring the climate control system.

Think Energy Efficiency

Today’s society is very environmentally conscious, which means there is a premium placed on operations with minimal carbon footprint. If that’s not enough incentive, skyrocketing energy costs are becoming more expensive to run air conditioning every summer, which is why you should see a high-efficiency system. When paired with smart thermostats, you can end up with a drastic reduction in utility bills. You may also be eligible for tax incentives and other rebates by purchasing a greener system.

Consider Dual Zones How to Choose the Right Central Air Conditioner

The location of your thermostat is a major factor in the amount of heating and cooling energy released to keep you comfortable, and there are several things you can do to eliminate waste. Many people choose to set up dual climate zones when setting up air conditioning in Watkinsville, as this feature can allow you to heat or cool the occupied area at home without wasting money on unused rooms. This can be very useful at night when comfort is only important in the upstairs bedroom.

Choose Reputable Manufacturer

Once you know the exact size and configuration for your air-conditioning unit, the only thing to do is choose the right model to order, but it’s important to realize that not all manufacturers have the same dedication to quality. Although the lower initial preliminary price tag may seem attractive, you can eliminate all of these savings if your device requires constant maintenance and repairs. Be sure to research the warranty and reliability before making a major purchase.